To start investing, what you need to have is the desire to commence the investment journey and not a large amount of money. With the advancement in digitisation, fintechs are coming up with innovative ideas to help people save small amounts of money regularly and to make regular investments of the money saved through micro investing.
While the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed the investors towards digital mode, there are huge gaps in the way the majority of India saves and invests. Over 200 million Indians still save manually mostly in assets which do not even beat inflation, hence losing money over time, instead of creating wealth. This is a result of high financial ignorance and inaccessibility to simple/efficient ways of saving money.
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Two of the micro financing platforms are Desiml and Gullak, which not only help people save small amounts daily, but also provide options to accumulate even small changes for investments.
While Desiml mainly focuses on investing in financial assets, Gullak invests predominantly in digital gold.
Let’s take the example of Gullak to understand how micro investment platforms work:
Gullak is a mobile app that automates savings and invests these in 24K gold. Users can auto-save as little as Rs 10 per day using the daily SIP feature into digital Gold. They can also increase their savings by investing their spare change into gold or by adding lump sum amounts in their savings pool as a one-time activity. Though Gullak promotes long-term savings and encourages users to leverage the power of compounding, it also gives users the entire control to pause or withdraw their savings in just 30 seconds.
Anyone with a mobile phone and the UPI app can use Gullak to start his/her wealth creation journey.
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How can one use Gullak?
To set up auto-pay and start saving on Gullak, a user needs to download the app on an Android or iOS smartphone.
There are two savings options available –
- daily amount that you wish to save for a select period
- save on every spend (spare change investment)
How and where is the money invested?
Gullak helps users automate their savings (i.e) if a user sets up auto-pay on D1, Gullak auto-saves money from the user’s account on a daily basis D2 onward. Users with autopay enabled have reported saving 5X more than what they used to earlier.
Gullak invests the user’s savings into digital Gold which has historically given 10% annual returns. The Gold investments happen at the current gold rate at the time of saving. Gullak has partnered with Augmont for digital Gold.
Pause and/or withdraw
Users can pause their savings and/or withdraw their savings as cash or get the gold delivered to their home.
